A recent article on The Guardian has the terrible title: No more nerds: how Dungeons & Dragons finally became cool.
This struck a nerve with a lot of people. My own opinion is that the title of this article sucks.
“No more nerds: how Dungeons & Dragons finally became cool“
Joshua Kubli over on MeWe is on point: [Emphasis added.]
“We will have made progress when “finally became cool” is instead written as “people finally realized how cool it was all along.“
The article itself seems to be OK, but that title is a “kick ’em for being nerds and take their stuff away” click bait.
I then went on a rant about this over on Twitter. I even looked up their process for submitting a complaint, but being a member of an interest group isn’t in their editorial code for them to even consider it. I pointed out that every category listed in their discrimination clause includes nerds.
Titles like this are a backhanded ad hominem that has no place in civilized conversation.
We need to do better and all nerds, geeks, dorks, and so forth need to complain about such things. Yes, things have gotten better culturally since 1978, but we don’t have to take it.
The post Revenge of The Nerds world should be better. We’re all nerds in our own way.
The nonsense I endured was nothing compared to racism, religionism, appearanceism, ableism, orientationism, & the like.
Everyone is welcome at my game, my table who is there to play the game & show respect & common courtesy to each other.
The only reason to exclude someone from your game is if they are an unrepentant jerk who has had intervention to explain the errors of their ways.
I did a podcast episode about this here.